Neck headstocks are profiled, tuner holes drilled, fingerboards slotted and profiled. (I’m really liking my new “Picasso” headplates.). The black headplates get the extensive inlay.
So now it is time to do the fingerboard and headstock inlays. First you sweep the shop floor carefully, since if/when you drop some little piece of pearl, it is impossible to find in any kind of debris, particularly since they seem to bounce at odd angles. I thought I might do a series of blog postings on how I go about developing and doing a pretty complex inlay.
The customer wants a hummingbird on the headstock of the parlor guitar I am building for her. I put together a number of different hummingbird pictures & drawings, and she selected one. I then took this drawing, and converted it into a line drawing on the computer, as an outline for the pearl cutting.
I take the basic line drawing and duplicate it many times on a page, to provide the patterns for cutting the various pieces.
Then the real fun begins. First you get out the pearl supplies, all different colors, and decide what to use for which piece, paying attention of the ‘grain’ in the pearl and the color. I have some golden pearl for the leaves, lots of different colors for the bird, one piece of pink ablaone I have been saving which has a real red flash for the throat area, some real shiny brown-black pearl with long striations for the bill… For alternate colors like the flowers I have a number of colors of a material called Recon-Stone which is made of stone dust and resin. It offers a wide palette and handles just about like pearl in terms of hardness, saw-ability, etc. though it is somewhat weaker so one has to be very careful with thin segments.
I also took the page of printed hummingbirds to Staples, and had a copy made onto transparency film. This allows one to see the pearl underneath, so one can line the pearl pattern up just right to get a desired effect. Of course, one can spend a lot of time playing with different pieces of pearl trying to decide what is the best.
Should the wing pattern go along the wing, or crosswise to the wing?
What about having a more circular pattern at the base of the wing?
or maybe the wing should not have much pattern, but be a uniform iridescence?
more to come when I make some decisions ….